Thank my lucky stars

I woke up to an email from my sister this morning. At the bottom of her email to me, there was a link.

I clicked it.

And what I saw put me in tears.

The link was to my childhood friend's blog. He and his wife welcomed their son into the world on May 2nd. A few hours later, the baby was lifeflighted to UCLA due to a heart condition discovered shortly after birth by the amazing nurses on duty the night he was born.

He is in surgery as I type.

He's only 6 days old and in his first surgery of what might be many.

Life is so not fair.

I can't stop thinking about the family as I sit here on my sofa, listening to my little guy babble away under his jungle gym.

I do not know much about the diagnosis of the baby ( Tetrology of Fallot with Pulmonic Artesia. ), but I do know that it's going to be a long road ahead for my friend and his wife. My heart goes out to them and all other families dealing with a sick child.

And tonight, I am thanking my lucky stars & hugging Sal extra tight, because having a healthy baby is not something to take for granted.

and a note to baby Shane....Sal says Fight hard, buddy! There's so much fun to have when you get better!

Make it: Newborn Pants

I recently went through my fabric stash, the one that was hidden under a guest bed in a tupperware bin , that I may or may not have forgotten about and found a bunch of polar fleece that I had left over from a project I did last football season.

I went through my pattern box, and found a pattern that was posted on made-by-rae.com's website for a basic newborn pant.

Her website has a free PDF pattern for home use--check it out. She has a ton of other tutorials and patterns to share.

These little pants are so simple to make, and use very little fabric. I whipped up 3 pairs of pants in less than 15 minutes. I made 2 pair of polar fleece ( one gray, and one yellow) and 1 shark print pair out of board short material I picked up for $2/yd. at the LA textile mart during my last trip there in October.

Look at those big butts--roomy enough for diapers! And, at a cost breakdown of something like 50 cents per pair, how can I beat that? Not so sure how I like the shark ones now that they are sewn up, but we'll try them out.